The integration between port and city is one of the approaches that underlie the 2021-2025 strategic plan of the Port of Barcelona: “There are those who, being in the jurisdiction of the port, believe they are in the city, never the other way around,” jokes David Serral, director of Port of Barcelona information systems. What is a priori an urban and sociological issue becomes an operational challenge for the Port Authority; Assuming it is a condition for the deployment of technologies in the port… and beyond. Following these five-year guidelines, the current systems plan has been prepared, aligned with the peculiarities of its organizational model.
In practice, “we are talking about several ports in one (containers, automobiles and cruise passengers are the most relevant categories) that provide service to a community made up mainly of shipowners, consignees and transporters.”
A good example of transversality is the PCS (Port Community System) platform, essentially a messaging system that controls the entire logistics flow of the port and generates 30 million messages annually. Renovated last year, it was awarded by competition to Kyndryl, which hosts it in a private cloud. It is based on Red Hat Open Shift (Linux) on IBM hardware supplied by Seidor and its contractual value is 3.6 million euros for five years. Serral emphasizes that it incorporates a DRS (disaster recovery site) so that, in the event of a possible interruption of the primary system, it is relieved in less than two hours.
PCS is the core around which multiple use cases that are now being prioritized will be articulated. One of the most relevant, soon to be tendered, will be “an emergency communications platform that, using the capabilities offered by a private 5G SA network – the most recent standard –, incorporates new functions such as push to video, integrated from mobile devices to the control center.” Lot 2 of the contest, cybersecurity services, was awarded to the company S2 Grupo.
At the recent MWC, in collaboration with Orange and Accenture, a prototype port environment surveillance system was presented using remotely controlled drones that capture and transmit images in real time through a private 5G SA network. With thirteen nodes (antennas), the system will cover a thousand hectares on land and up to two nautical miles off the coast. “We want to take advantage of the qualities of the latest version of 5G due to its capacity, low latency and high speed and incorporate an unconnected maritime area into coverage,” says Serral. This year's America's Cup will be a stimulus for innovation: the operator Orange has just been awarded the deployment of a private network infrastructure that will be available on time, in May or June.
The extension of coverage and the deployment of sensors on buoys will give a new scope to port services. The America's Cup is an opportunity to multiply the installation of connected cameras. "Not all of them will be permanent, but they will allow us to test high-speed coverage in the water, something unusual in other ports, as far as I know." Beyond this objective, they will help improve and control the state and quality of water and air through IoT systems, in addition to providing images to third parties and systems on board vessels.
Another component of the systems plan is the gradual conversion of corporate applications to the cloud, based on the software as a service (SaaS) model. But be careful: “We have learned from other experiences that only what deserves it and that we can control should be uploaded to the cloud.”
